Thursday, July 17, 2008

Full Force with my Roll Up and Stuff It Shooting Script

It’s full force to September from here. We’re recasting, crewing up, paying deposits and MOST IMPORTANTLY for ME anyway is I’m getting ORGANIZED and putting my game face on. If you have ever watched any of Oliver Stone Behind the Scenes clips on any of his DVDs, (and many other Directors as well,) you will see him carry around this massive 3 Inch Binder packed full with all the notes, scripts etc in it. Sure his films are like 4 hours long and I’m sure the info is all there but directing is a tiring job and the last thing I want to have to do is cart around a notebook the size of my car for 4 days let alone 30 days. Jobbers was my biggest film and I had a 4 incher for that fraggin’ monster of a film, but because I was the lead actor in it, I thought carrying that thing around would only be trouble, so I would run off the pages of the script, notes etc of what we were shooting that day at 50% of original size, the night before the shoot. Then cut them out as individual pages and staple it all together, (I could get away with this. My eye sight is still good, knock on wood,) and stuff the mini reference in my back pocket. For Meter and the rest of the films before that, it was a See Thru Clip On Spine type Report Cover with all my pages, boards and shit stuffed inside. Jeopardy is no different and the point of this story isn’t Notebook Carrying 101, it is the fact that, this ritual of mine is usually done when my mind turns from Production Labor to Director/Artist which also means that I’ve tied up all the other BULLSHIT I gotta deal with and from there on out, (or here on out in this case,) it’s Making Movieville in Garrick’s brain from here until September 29th. For Jeopardy, I have my Color Codes to keep me organized, my storyboards to make my shot lists with and well, the script so I know what and when I’m shooting. I’m surprised I’m at this point in the project to be doing this because merely three weeks ago, I felt maybe we were never gonna’ make the film at all. What a difference a day makes.

What comes with my little “Roll up and Stuff in My Back Pocket Folder,” is the Journal. Every production I’ve ever done has had it’s own personal leather wrapped slab of trees where I spew out all my stuff. (With the exception of the Jersey Bootleg where I wrote the entire journal on New York Post Newspapers because I was too drunk to keep up with anything.) This one [Jeopardy’s] is full of sketches and a lot of these entries before I sit down to type them. It’s just a little of everything. I do this for my children. I figure if I never get anywhere with this thing I do, one day my kids will stumble across all this junk and may read it and realize well hell…. “Dad was really a nobody, but we can’t say it was from lack of trying.”